"It was a time when a certain amount of cynicism and moral confusion set in among Western democracies. When those who warned about a coming crisis, the rise of fascism and nazism, they were ridiculed or ignored. Indeed, in the decades before World War II, a great many argued that the fascist threat was exaggerated or that it was someone else’s problem. Some nations tried to negotiate a separate peace, even as the enemy made its deadly ambitions crystal clear. It was, as Winston Churchill observed, a bit like feeding a crocodile, hoping it would eat you last.

"There was a strange innocence about the world. Someone recently recalled one U.S. senator’s reaction in September of 1939 upon hearing that Hitler had invaded Poland to start World War II. He exclaimed: ‘Lord, if only I had talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided!’"

He’s talking about Sen. William E. Borah, the "Lion of Idaho," a staunch opponent of U.S. intervention in World War II  along with the overwhelming majority of the American people at the time. This majority included, I might add, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who  at least in his public pronouncements  declared his total opposition to U.S. intervention in the European conflict. When Hitler invaded Poland, the president gave a press conference the next morning in which he echoed Borah’s hope that American involvement could be avoided. Questioned as to whether the U.S. could stay out of the war, he said, "I not only sincerely hope so, but I believe we can, and that every effort will be made by the administration to do so."

Was Roosevelt, too, a victim of this "strange innocence"? Whatever else one may say about him, "innocent" is hardly [.pdf] the word that comes immediately to mind: he was, in fact, a coldly calculating politician and champion liar who, step by step, embroiled us in a worldwide conflagration that killed millions, handed Stalin half of Europe and much of Asia, and ensured the Soviet mutant a half century more of monstrous life. In any case, the president that Rumsfeld and the other 1939ers would liken to our reigning chief executive echoed Borah’s hopes for peace, however insincerely.

I won’t go into the absurdities of conflating German national socialism or Italian fascism with the theological obscurantism peddled by Osama bin Laden and his cohorts. Suffice to say that the modernist vision of a super-centralized corporatist state, secular at its core, that constitutes classical fascist ideology is in many ways the opposite of the Islamist vision, which is supranational, not super-nationalistic, and nowhere commands state power. There is, at any rate, no real attempt to validate the Fallacy of ’39: it is simply asserted, without any real arguments drawing on the supposed historical parallels. It is nothing but rhetorical wind, the passing of which is meant to befoul the political atmosphere and smear the War Party’s opponents as the contemporary equivalent of Nazi sympathizers.

Bin Laden and his fellow terrorists are monsters, surely, but they are not fascists  a term that has a very specific meaning, one that hardly fits al-Qaeda. Yet there are fascists in this world. We are indebted to Lew Rockwell, president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, for identifying a new variant of this totalitarian creed in what he calls "red-state fascism," which is fast becoming the dominant ideology of the neoconized GOP. To be sure, he diagnoses this as an incipient breed of the fascist virus, not yet full-blown, but a dangerous trend nonetheless  and one that has been greatly exacerbated since the publication of Lew’s prescient article. I took up this theme in a column, as did Scott McConnell in The American Conservative, and those interested in the subject can peruse these pieces at their leisure. The point, however, is that the "Islamo-fascist" meme is a classic example of projection  that is, superimposing one’s own motives and psychology on someone else.

The "red-state fascism" exemplified by the Bushian Republican Party does indeed resemble the classic version in more ways than one: There is the Leader Principle, which gives the presidency nearly as much legal and political weight as the national socialists gave their Führer. There is the creation of a super-centralizedsurveillance society, in which the civil liberties of individual citizens are liquidated in the interests of "national security." And there is, above all, a militantly expansionist foreign policy, a vision of world hegemony founded on conquest and baptized in the blood of innocents.

When the Bushians call bin Laden a "fascist," the only proper response is, Look who’s talking!

There is a fascist threat to America, all right, but it isn’t coming from overseas. It isn’t hiding in the caves of Wahhabistan, but lurking in Washington’s corridors of power. The same people who warn us of a "fascist" threat coming from abroad are the main purveyors of authoritarianism on the home front. And that is what life is like in the Bizarro World of America in the year A.D. 2006, where the most militant fascists of all style themselves the leaders of a new "anti-fascist" popular front.

Author: Justin Raimondo

Justin Raimondo is the editorial director of Antiwar.com, and a senior fellow at the Randolph Bourne Institute. He is a contributing editor at The American Conservative, and writes a monthly column for Chronicles. He is the author of Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement [Center for Libertarian Studies, 1993; Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2000], and An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard [Prometheus Books, 2000].
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